Mobile electronic devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, continue to evolve through increasing levels of performance and functionality as manufacturers design products that offer consumers greater convenience and productivity. One such convenience is a mobile device's capability of automatically connecting wirelessly to a communication network or network, such as the Internet, using a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) including one or more wireless access points (APs). A wireless access point, also referred to herein simply as an access point, typically has a wired connection to the network and facilitates a wireless connection between a mobile device and the network.
With the high rate of wireless access point deployment, e.g., in private WLANs such as in work environments and in public WLANs such as hotspots in retail environments, mobile devices can automatically establish wireless connections in nearly every location that a user might travel. Such increased accessibility to networks by more and more users is generally desired. However, this increased accessibility has its drawbacks, such as the potential to overload network devices due to increased access authentication signaling.
More particularly, many wireless connections are far too short for a user to take advantage of the connection. Nonetheless, as the number of these shorter connections increase, these shorter connections needlessly burden the network and network devices with increased signaling traffic. Such traffic includes, for example, signaling between the mobile device and the network to establish and tear down the connections, signaling to authenticate the mobile device and perhaps the user to the network, signaling for access authorization, and signaling for traffic accounting. Such signaling is generally referred to as authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) signaling.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of disclosed embodiments. In addition, the description and drawings do not necessarily require the order illustrated. It will be further appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required.
The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present disclosure so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.